How to link your website to your Facebook Page or Profile for Insights

Generally speaking I consider myself to be a pretty decent social media expert. I spend hours every day reading about, thinking about and doing social media. It’s both my hobby and my job. Despite this, every now and then I come across social media things – big things – that I didn’t know about. When these things relate to Facebook, I get even more cross with myself. But then I think, is it really my fault, or should I blame Zuckers for being so shit at communication? Yep, I’m pretty sure it’s all his fault.

Anyway now that we’ve deflected all blame from me, let me get to the point. Today, on a search for insights-related information, I stumbled across a Facebook feature where you can link your website to either your own profile or one of your pages. I truly had no idea that this feature existed, so was unsure what it really meant. No better way to find out than give it a go. I used the fairly basic web skills/literacy I had to add a meta tag to my site, and voila, all of a sudden I had all these awesome stats right before my very eyes.

If you already knew about this, and are sitting there completely awe-struck at my ignorance, mentally erasing my name from your mind while you unlike my Facebook page, delete my website bookmark and unfollow me on Twitter, then you can exit this page now and have a great rest of your life.

However if you share my ignorance in this matter, and find it of interest you can read on. I’m going to first outline what insights you get access to by joining the two, and then tell you how to do it yourself if you think it’s as awesome as I do.

Website Facebook Insights

So what do you get by joining your website and your page/profile? A bunch of statistics that essentially let you know how many people are sharing your website content on Facebook, how many impressions you have gotten of that content on Facebook, and how many people have then visited your website through that shared content. For example, someone goes to my site and shares one of my articles on Facebook, because they find it to be just the right delightful mix of humour, information and insight (of course). This post of theirs is then seen 319 times by their Facebook friends and/or subscribers. 23 of these friends (the intellectual ones with awesome sense of humour) then click through to read the article themselves. All of these actions would be recorded in the Insights section.

Note: I have just discovered there seems to be a discrepancy in the statistics Facebook is displaying with the real share data on my site – over the past month there has been much more than 39 shares/likes, just going on the plug-in data (not even counting organic shares). I think this may be a result of Facebook not supporting the ‘Share’ button anymore (in this section it only lists Like, Send and organic share), but I’m not sure. Though it may not give 100% accurate information, I still find it to be really helpful.

The graph above illustrates over the past month that a link to content on my site has been shared 39 times on Facebook, which has resulted in 104,552 total impressions and led to a click-through rate of 0.14%, or 146 people clicking through to my site.
Facebook then illustrates this data in graph format, so you can see when the links were shared, and whether they were shared by ‘likes’ or ‘shares’. Pretty cool.

The next graph shows you how many impressions each type of share (like or share) received over the month. As you can see, the shares led to a much higher number of impressions than the likes. This was partially due to the fact there was almost three times as many shares as there were likes.

The last graph displays the total clicks over the time period, also displaying which came from ‘likes’ and which from ‘shares’. As you can see here, shares once again were much more successful than likes in encouraging people to click-through to my site.

There’s nothing earth-shattering about these stats, and you can track how many times your content is shared on Facebook through social plugins and analytics tools. However, the impressions and clicks data I had not been tracking previously through any third-party analytics services, so I find this really interesting.

More details

As if that wasn’t enough, Facebook also allows you to drill down further into each share type – the like button, send button, organic shares and the comments box. For each of these features that you are using on your site, you can drill down into more detail about the impressions and CTR per day, the demographics of people sharing your data and Popular Pages.

Click on the ‘Insights for your website’ green button up the top right of the page

Click on the ‘Link with’ drop-down menu (see pic below) and choose the Page you would like to link your site with. Or alternatively, you can link it with your own profile if you don’t have a Page for your website.

Take the meta tag that Facebook displays underneath this drop-down menu and add it to your root webpage. I did this by editing the header.php file of my website, and sticking this meta tag in before . If you don’t know how to do this, you can probably google it or ask a web nerd you know to help you out. It took me a matter of seconds, so I can assure you it can’t be hard.

Click ‘Get Insights’ and as long as you put the right meta tag into the right place, you’re done!

Did you know about this feature before? If so, please leave your derisive comments below. If not, please leave messages of encouragement and thanks below, so that I can feel safe and secure in the knowledge it wasn’t just me.

Lastly – what do you think about this? I was pretty excited to learn that my site had had over 100,000 impressions over just one month on Facebook, even though I’m not getting quite the same level of sharing as some OTHER social media sites (we know which is better, right?). But maybe it’s just me. Is it?

Thanks so much for this fantastic information! I’m a technophobe who’s being dragged kicking and screaming into this social media world and your instructions enabled even me to do it… I’m impressed! Many thanks.

Question – if I am and admin to two different Facebook pages – how do I add the insight to just one? In my case I’m an admin for Dallas Moms Blog and for Ultimate Pilates Plano but I only want the insight to be added to UP Plano. I don’t see any options in the Insights page to add it to just one page and I’m afraid that if I follow the steps then I’ll be adding the insight from the UP website to the DMB Facebook page. And that would be bad. thanks for the info and help!
~Amanda

Hi Amanda, I’m not 100% sure what you’re asking because that article is showing you how to track insights for a website, not a facebook page. It just tracks the Facebook-related insights (eg. shares, likes etc). Does that make sense? So you could definitely track the insights for just one of your websites and not the other. Your Facebook pages already have their own insights automatically

Thankyou for this information. I had no idea how to link a website to Facebook. My website is still under construction as I am useless on a computer but when I eventually get it finished I will follow your instructions. Thanks again

Hi Pearl, yes you’ll have to create an app on your Facebook page that can direct people to your website. The easiest way that I’m aware of would be to create a static image of your logo/site URL and perhaps the text ‘visit our site’ or similar, then when people click on the image it directs them to your website. Happy to explain further if you want to shoot me an email – cara [@] thesocialskinny.com

Well I tried! I’m a computer illiterate and think I’ve messed up! I tried to tweet what I thought was meta tag … Whatever that is .. And twitter won’t let me tweet it saying its an error!! I’m trying to encourage our twitter followers to like our FB page and thought this link would o it ..help!

Hi, thanks, I have been trying to link my website and Facebook page for ages, now I’ve done it following your instructions. I am very new to all of this, I get that Google is big on social media and adding value etc. and that it is very important to link to twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. But my question is, naively, if you have a Facebook “like” button on your website, does this have any reflection or correlation to your Facebook page/ It does not seem to have (likes on webpage not the same number as on Facebook page for example). Thanks for your help so far anyway!

I have a question. My website was built with an existing Facebook logo/link on it but I need when persons click on it for the logo/link to direct them to my Facebook page for the website. Does this also do that?

Hi I am trying to link my website to my facebook business page , following your directions I think but it still is not working. What I would love to do is add a tab for “shop on line” and then it goes directly to my pampered chef website
any help is appreciated

Thank you! This is something that I never know about. I followed the instruction add am about to click the button Get Insights. I will see what will come out. Thank you once again, as this is a great post please keep us informed.

I’didn’t know about this. Thanks. I have installed it. My knowledge grows with your information, alas I still am trying to get more traffic. It can not be entirely organic these days. My study of DIY SEO is on … Cheers

Just another question, how does one harvest the likes from the facebook page and bring it on to the website. I ran a likes ad campaign for Facebook page but not sure why the likes did not get transfered to the page. it does through an app though in a indirect way!

Cara; Great job I would like more info from you and I would be nice if you took this time to link with my web site. What I would like to know is how to link up and get linked up with other web sites?
Thank you
Matthew

Thanks for the tip, but like others maybe it’s not a great thing to know if your just starting out and have nobody sharing your page http://www.splendourIT.com.au But I’m an optimist and ignorance is not an excuse, time to push for facebook likes!

Hi Cara,
The link in the instructions is sending me to a unavailable Facebook page. Also I can’t find the green tag on my insight page. It says there is a new design,maybe that’s why I am not finding it?

I was just hired to help my boss who owns this company. When I go to the website, at the bottom it says she her on FB (the little icon), but it takes me to someone else with the same name. This is for FB and for LinkedIN. Do I need to delete and start again?
thanx so much for your help!
Terry

Hi! Love the post. Question: Is there an official way to link one’s URL to their Facebook page? I notice in friends’ feeds, if they share a link from Amazon, let’s say, the story will prompt me to LIKE the Amazon FB page. How do I get that?

Hi there, I tried this but alas, I am SUCH a dinosaur it wont work and says the same ‘no admin data’ error warning that some other comments above have mentioned…
Have tried adding the code to all the various bits of my site header / footer etc and no joy…

Thank you for the info!
I tried to do as you suggested but I get this error (I translate from Italian):
“No admin data found in the Web base page
Insights requires admin data in this Web page for the URL specified”.
I don’t understand what I need to do…!

when I go to http://www.facebook.com/insights it just takes me to a page with three options: App Insights, Page Insights and Domain Insights but no green button up the top right of the page…I would appreciate your help so much…I’ve been trying to accomplish this for a while now…thank you so much.

“No admin data found at root webpage ‘http://www.shaunstable.tk/’. Insights requires admin data at the root webpage for the domain ‘www.shaunstable.tk’. Use https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug to verify that we are able to extract the admin data from your root webpage.”

how do I word the og:image tag? would this be correct” <meta property="og:image" content="Images/logo.png""

Thanks for this article. Do not assume anything anywhere as there will be always beginners, intermediate and advanced who does not know or are keen to learn.
It was helpful to me and I am sure helpful to many others

Hi, Cara:
I am trying to link an already established wordpress.org business website to a semi-new business FB page. The issue is there was a previous business FB page that the “Like Us On Facebook” icons drive people to once it is clicked on…however the “old” FB page is no longer in use. HELP, PLEASE!

Re your #2 instruction: There is no Green Button at the top right hand corner of the page – or anywhere else for that matter. I have scoured the web and simply cannot find anyone who can tell me how to link my website to my Facebook page. NOT my FB page to my website, but my website to to my FB page. Very frustrating!!

Howdy very nice web site!! Guy .. Excellent .. Superb .. I’ll bookmark your web site and take the feeds additionallyI am glad to search out so many helpful info here in the put up, we want develop more techniques in this regard, thanks for sharing.

This really is actually fascinating, That you are a quite specialist blogger. Ive joined your rss feed and sit up for looking for more of your excellent post. Also, I have shared your web site in my social networks!

If you are on a site or have made a video and you have an option from where ever you are to click share with Facebook. It always defaults my personal Facebook page rather than my business Facebook page. Is there a way to change it it have both pages pop up to choose which one you want to share whatever it is you want to share? Can you help with this? Thanks in advance.

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About me + this blog

Hi there, my name is Cara Pring, welcome to The Social Skinny, a website dedicated to social media and website optimization strategy. If you want simple, jargon-free tips and updates, you've come to the right place! Outside the geeky expert stuff I'm a crazy cat lady from Sydney - and no, that is not me in the header (everyone asks). You can find out more about me in the About page or you can connect with me on Twitter, FB, LinkedIn & G+. Thanks for stopping by :)
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